Knead the Stars By Asghar Abbas

Turning men into monsters, manufacturing them to be relentless in their skewed ideologies making them brutal, restive, truly merciless? I hardly think so. It’s more like they are pouring men into the clay of monsters, thus perfecting their nature, for it is in the nature of a monster to be man. Human Clay never made much sense to me. Listen, let me ask you something ; what’s more alarming, the savagery lurking behind the masks of the savages , or the pleasant faced puppeteers pulling all the strings? But really, nothing is more dangerous to the beating heart of a civilization than a falsely placid mindset melded with a reinforced set of reassurances that are nothing more than ice cream flavored ad nauseam, not even good ones, so sweetly doled out and stuffed into that great beast that’s peopled by people, until its ability to question anything is almost nonexistent. That beast is dying, in case you didn’t notice or can’t tell. Wrapped in and huddling under the worn-out fleece bristling, jostling the regular joes of average every day throb, bleat, until finally turning average themselves they have no choice but to seek solace from shadows put there for them but are not there in fact, inevitably finding shelter under the altered awning wondering why are they still cold when they were sold on the warmth of conformity.

But they weren’t duped into anything, no one tricked them into this golden silence of theirs. All that they not do is of their own accord. They were fed upon too many uniformed ideas that led to segueing of all their thoughts into one, sweeping all that they were given to believe into one big slush pile. From that pile, they fattened into slugs that are smug about nothing. Every single one of them is dead just still walking, lining up with mouths opened for some more. Way too comfortable in their role of cattle, too pleased with the shape of their butcher’s cleaver gleaming with their acceptance that is anything but invariable. Nothing is set in Stone. Wear the skin of a lamb for too long, far too long and everything will start to look like a chopping block. They don’t realize the number of the powerless is but few. They don’t put up any fight, instead these genteel giants who can shake worlds, given or taken, silently lead the bottom feeding crustaceans by hand to their own execution. Lofty but resigned, really embracing that outcome that needn’t come. When they do that, they aren’t doing anyone any favors. That kind of defeatist attitude only blunts critical thinking. And the rest, they go on not living behaving like this, they act like there is no other way out of this, veering, lurching, pitching sideways, they hobble and wobble, teetering, shuffling drunk on revelations that aren’t coming.

A pinprick of a cry, a genuine wail yes, is felt throughout the Ages, but the guttural scream is gutted out, muted, and not heard at all. See, when you guillotine the innocent you are sparing the guilty.

There is so much that goes into making a person, into the mechanism of just one tiny heartbeat, all those suns and stars, all the dank constellations, the rouge planets, and constant hells. All heavens wants to do is prostrate individuals, each and every one of you. And when the civilized savages slaughter everyone sundry and all, they are slaughtering all those untold galaxies tearing apart the altars where all the different kind of moons were to kneel for you.

Not so much in 2005 but in 2015 the mental liberty finally died, and no, not with thunderous applause Natalie Portman’s alter ego, but with the outraged furor and furious practice of selecting the prettier tragedies and the myopic updating that’s faulty by default for Show of solidarity. Right before turning back to their pauper reality and liking everything that they see. Loving the decorative blinders, already at peace with the status quo. Of course, not everyone’s the same, not all are like that but there is War happening, a war going on between the Most who think they know and the Few who know what they know.

In a twist ending that surprises exactly no one, the extra EXTRA terrestrials on their way to harvest the Earth deviates from their course set for imminent invasion, diverting back from whence they came. They are too late….. or too early. Earth’s denizens are already killing each other, destroying their planet and looks like they are doing a pretty good job of it too! Aliens that are supposed to be the silver lining in all of this have better things to do than harangue and haggle with barely evolved monkeys. More than likely they are de- evolving. Aliens have other sentient beings, who are truly sentient, to parley with, better places to be. They needn’t deal with such haughty people who thinks they are alone when they aren’t even the center of their own universe. Pitiful creatures, time is not on their side; time openly molests them and they still think they have more of it. Fools, they are bankrupting their humanity, as if they had plenty to begin with. Aliens turning their fourth dimensional faces away.

Don’t Go! Please come back ! Or at least take us with you. So terrified to be left among our own kind.

Quisling ! Quisling ! Quisling ! On our mind. Come back.

You gotta wonder if those in high towers made of ivory and human bones feel love for anything other than their souls they print on green cotton. They can knead the stars and yet instead their eyes are down cast like the thieves that they are scouring the desert looking for what is crawling under all that sand. I hope it’s worth it, bartering the future of their children for something unsustainable, insubstantial, and crude as that. I hope it’s worth selling out the pro genies of this planet. What the future of the future will see ?

Fridays are always thirteen in all the stories, in every telling the humans attack the docile monsters and the sheep devours the lions. Maybe in an idealistic world, or even just a honest one, in simplistic terms, those who can should invest in NASA and not in the War Machine that rages on and on until there is nothing left to rage against. Verses of sweltering jungles in the east farther away and the desert in the middle, are one of the most heinous and horrendous display of being human ever written down in the frail, flimsy, fallible, fractured, fabricated five thousand years old recorded history that is all but fabled and yet is still being tweaked as we go along. Such Natural Acts mustn’t be repeated, but it’s a broken record that will keep on spinning, a continuous loop that will keep on looping until this too shall pass.